Posted October 12, 2013

by Jerry Alatalo

Academy Award winning director of “Inside Job” Charles Ferguson is one of the go-to people on the planet when it comes to Wall Street and government corruption. His film won the award in 2011 and told the story of what really happened in 2008 and the economic meltdown. Many of you remember the film and probably re-view it now and then because it is a powerful indictment of Wall Street fraud and government inaction.

Mr. Ferguson appears in this video about a year ago on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. This was four years after the crash caused by massive fraud in the largest financial corporations on Earth. No banking executive has faced prosecution.

His book “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America” has much more damning information than the documentary. In this interview Mr. Ferguson notes that major actors contributed to the still ongoing worldwide crisis, with the financial services industry still running without regulation. The corruption has continued unabated, with many people unaware of how influential has been academia, those who live in ivory towers-the “economists”.

The emphasis on money is also felt and practiced in the actions of academia with professors of economics who sell their expertise for large sums to giant companies. The élite academics sit on the boards of directors, on presidents’ economic councils directing policy for the nation, lecture on the speaking circuit, and work as consultants for billion dollar hedge funds-all for multi-million dollar fees.

There is a clip of an economist who is questioned by Ferguson “if there is a conflict of interest” when men work for the government and consult with financial firms, and the answer is “I doubt it”.

I doubt that.

He points to Larry Summers, who recently walked away from consideration for Federal Reserve Chairman, as “Exhibit A” in the open-and-shut case of revolving doors from academics to politics, to major industries, to financial services consultant, etc. Summers argued for deregulation which brought the massive frauds into existence-many are aware of the investigative journalist Greg Palast’s article describing Summers and Tim Geithner actions to allow derivative frauds around the world.

When Summers was Secretary of the Treasury he publicly dressed down a colleague at a convention when the colleague spoke about the risks of a catastrophic meltdown if action wasn’t taken to prevent it. Ferguson notes that there were massive amounts of securities frauds, accounting frauds, and breaking of Sarbanes-Oxley laws.

In the video we hear Barack Obama speaking to reporters and saying “biggest problem is that a lot of that stuff was immoral, unethical or reckless… not illegal… frustrations”. Mr. Ferguson then points out that the president is wrong, that there is evidence of extensive and highly illegal conduct, including the securities and accounting frauds, and Sarbanes-Oxley crimes. He mentions “publicly available evidence of massive criminal behavior”.

Money has taken over economic policy, academia, and the political system.

Ever since the deregulation of the Ronald Reagan administration money has become ever more influential in the billions of dollars’ election campaigns. The financial sector has outspent the public sector by 50 to 1, becoming seriously dangerous to both democracy and the economy of America and the world.

“Bad news, right down the line. An economic élite, lawless and arrogant… Bought and paid for government and a growing underclass. (quotes Ferguson) ‘There are now tens of millions of Americans whose condition is little better than many people in third world nations’ / Americans are getting angry, and even when they’re misguided or poorly informed, they have a deep visceral feeling that they are getting screwed…”

“Captures a non-discussable. Not afraid to bring into focus that most of our institutions have been taken over by the criminal class… Be prepared for some shocking findings and have the antacids ready…”

“important political book… Deserves a wide audience and serious scrutiny.”

“Rage against the machine. If you were being raped as we are by the machine, would you insist on gradual withdrawal?”

“The gangsters of Wall Street. Ferguson, I am sure is on Wall Street’s black list. You will not be able to come up with enough “dirty” words to describe your outrage.”

“No matter how many financial crisis books you’ve read, you need to read this one. Yet the author has hope that a day will come that the American people won’t take it any more.”

“If you care about America’s future, read this book. It’s time to end the Wall Street stranglehold.”

“Painful decay.”

“This book exposes a multitude of details that do not fit in a movie and should be known by every American. Actually by every human.”

“Read. This. Book.”

“In this book, Charles uses his own words to describe what happened. And it’s still happening, get this book. AWESOME.”

Just as in a small-town bank the wealthiest individuals and families in that town own it, the private central banks in those nations where they operate, in small and large countries, are owned by the wealthiest people on Earth-the “Big Town”. One has memory of Mr. Ross Perot’s famous line delivered in a 1992 presidential debate, not directed toward banks but toward the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), where he described a “huge sucking sound” of jobs moving from America to Mexico and other countries where corporations have since set-up shop with employees working for much less money than Americans.

His “huge sucking sound” reference can easily apply to private central banking, where money has been circulating for centuries, with vacuüm cleaner efficiency, up from average citizens, and through the tube to the owners/stock-holders of those banks.

Everyone on Earth now knows what has occurred through history regarding this private central banking phenomena and realize that, like the Jack Nicholson movie, “Something’s Gotta Give”. In an earlier post I predicted that the Federal Reserve as we know it will end. Public banking is an idea whose time has come. Thanks to many men and women around the world, including Ellen Brown in this interview, founder and president of the Public Banking Institute, people are now moving and taking the necessary actions to create public banks.

There are more than twenty states in America which are initiating action to set up state-owned public banks along the lines of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.

In this interview Ellen Brown stressed the absolute importance of citizens’ becoming fully informed about the public banking solution. She points out that it is essential for as many men and women as possible to have a full and complete knowledge of banking before they can advocate and bring public banks into reality. There is a lot of misunderstanding and ignorance about banking. An excellent place to learn about public banking are at Ellen Brown’s very good websites. Here are two of them:

The Bank of North Dakota is the sole repository of the state’s deposits and revenues. It is a huge deposit and asset base which returns the profits to the bank/people instead of seeing those profits going to Wall Street. Ms. Brown mentions that 40% of banks around the world are state-owned public institutions. She then mentions the BRICS financial alliance (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) which represents 40% of the population on Earth.

Germany has public banks in some of their cities and counties which facilitate loans at low-interest for local businesses and for infrastructure projects. What is important to note is that public banking has no speculative transactions like Wall Street, where reckless gambling on derivatives, interest rate swaps, and other complex transactions, with customer deposits, led to multi-billion dollar losses which the American taxpayers bailed out. Wall Street operators made huge, risky bets using their customer’s money to earn profits for themselves.

It is casino gambling which has led to hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives trading. Bank of America and Chase have upward of 70-80 trillion dollars worth of derivatives on their books. Ms. Brown describes the “shadow banking system”, the wild-west aspect of finance, where operators routinely gamble recklessly with billions of dollars of bets, and super-priority claims of derivatives in bankruptcy cases such as is the current situation in Detroit.

She notes that it is time for a new banking system which will allow none of the massive fraud and corruption which led to the financial crisis of 2008, continuing to this day.

With the next inevitable burst of the financial bubble-since the beginning of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 the boom and bust cycle has marched on relentlessly-the situation will find the nation in a place where there is 25 billion dollars in the FDIC, and the Dodd-Frank provisions by law allow no government bail-out(s). At that point the bankrupt banks will turn to “bail-ins”-the banks will take depositor money to re-capitalize themselves.

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